The tinker leaned forward and grasped the milk bottle by the neck and filled up again the three little glass pots.
“Tell me, Packie,” Hackett said, revolving his glass on its base, “do you know of a young fellow by the name of Minor — Jimmy Minor?”
Packie, leaning back once more against the stove, did not look at him. “Minor?” he said, and made a show of reflecting deeply. “Who would he be?”
“He was a reporter,” Hackett said. “For the newspapers.”
The tinker was looking into his drink. “Why would I know him?”
“What I’m asking is if you knew him.”
There was a silence. Quirke watched the detective. Hackett, he reflected, was like one of those jungle predators that go slack and still at the approach of their quarry. Perhaps that was what it took to be an investigator, that capacity to wait in watchful calm, patiently.
Packie the Pike sucked his teeth. “What would a newspaper man be doing out here?” he said.
Hackett turned his gaze to the rounded ceiling. “Well, he might, for instance, have been asking after a certain cleric who I’m sure you do know.”
Packie glinted at him. “What cleric?”
“Father Michael Honan — Father Mick. You do know him, now, Packie, don’t you?”
Packie scowled, and said nothing, and looked away again.
Quirke brought out his cigarette case, clicked it open, and offered it flat on the palm of his hand to the tinker. Packie took two cigarettes, clipping one of them behind his ear. Leaning down to the flame of Quirke’s lighter he gave Quirke a merrily conspiratorial glance, and winked. The lighter’s petrol smell blended with the big man’s stink and Quirke felt his nostrils constrict. In his mind he saw again the phantom dog under the caravan rootling in the guts of its splayed and twitching victim. Malachy — he would go to see Malachy this evening, yes, yes, he would. Malachy would help him. He had a sensation of falling, slowly falling, inside himself.
There was a sound outside and a face appeared at one of the little square windows behind Packie’s shoulder, a young man’s face; it was there for a moment and then was as quickly gone as it had come. Quirke did not know if Hackett had seen it.
“What do you say, Packie?” Hackett said. “Tell us, now, did the newspaper chap come out here to ask about Father Mick?”
Packie gave a sort of growl deep in his throat. “I have no dealings with the cuinnes,” he said.
“Cuinne?” Hackett murmured, cocking his head to one side. “That’s a word I don’t know, Packie.”
“The cuinnes—the priests!” Packie said. “Them are for the women to be dealing with, and the gatrins. The cuinnes do be always on about sending the young ones to school, when they’re not cajoling the women to tell them their shakos.”
“Shakos?” Hackett said, elaborately frowning. “That’s another one I never heard of.”
“Their sins,” Packie said, with a dismissive shrug.
“God, Packie,” Hackett said, “we’re getting a great education here today.” He turned to Quirke. “Isn’t that so, Doctor? Words you never knew before.”
The tinker glanced towards Quirke with a sardonic eye. “The Hacker here,” he said, “thinks he’s a great speaker of the Cant — that’s our talk, you know, our own lingo.” He turned back to the detective. “The cuinnes love to hear the women telling their sins. It gives them a rise, so I hear, and sure who’d begrudge them, the poor hoors, with their yokes lashed tight to the inside of their leg to keep them from doing harm.” Again he threw up his head and gave the hooting laugh that was not a laugh.
Hackett put the glass pot on the table and picked up his hat, seeming about to depart. He stopped, however, and raised a hand to his forehead, acting the part of a man suddenly struck by a thought. “Did I mention, by the way, Packie,” he said, “that Minor, the newspaper chap, got himself killed — murdered, in fact?”
Again Quirke seemed to feel the curved walls around them drawing inwards sharply. The poteen had set up a buzzing in his head that was distracting in a faintly euphoric way — he was getting drunk, in other words, and was glad of it. He looked about. He had finished his cigarette and did not know what to do with the butt. He wondered, with vague inconsequence, where the woman kept her things, her clothes, and so on — under one of the beds, maybe? How did they live, these people? He realized he knew nothing about them or their ways. Maybe the woman did not keep her clothes here; maybe there was another caravan, for sleeping in, and dressing in. He thought of the dark glance she had cast at him, of her shining black mane of hair, of the careless slouch of her hips. He thought too of the child’s glance out of those wounded eyes. They knew something, those two, and he wondered what it was. He swallowed more poteen. His temples were tightening and his cheeks had taken on that glassy sensation that drink always brought.
Packie was still leaning against the potbellied stove, gazing with studied interest at the little glass jar he was holding in his fingers.
“You know Father Mick is going away, do you, Packie?” Hackett said. “They’re sending him off to Africa, to convert the Hottentots.” He paused. “He’ll be a great loss to your people, I’d say?”
“I told you,” the tinker said, “I have no truck with them fellows.”
“Ah, but Father Mick isn’t like the rest of them, now, is he?”
Packie gave him a sullen look. “The priests is the priests.”
“I won’t deny that,” Hackett said, turning the brim of his hat in his fingers. “Does he come out here often, Father Mick?”
“He don’t come out at all, anymore,” Packie said. He lifted the glass jar to his lips and emptied it. “He’s not welcome here,” he said. “We don’t need him or his like.”
Hackett smiled wistfully. “So the women have no one to tell their sins to, anymore?”
The tinker banged the glass pot down on the little table and glared at the detective, thrusting his great shaggy head forward, his stony eyes widening. Quirke felt a surge of blood in his throat. He wanted something to happen, he realized, wanted violence, sudden lunges, the sound of fists on flesh. He thought: I would like someone to die.
Hackett made no move. His hat was still in his hands, and he was still calmly smiling, looking up at the tinker, who was towering over him, enraged and glaring. “What did you say was the word for a sin?” he said. “Shako, was it? I must remember that. Yes — a handy word to know.”
He stood up from the bed, a short pudgy man with a few wisps of black hair combed across his balding pate and a frog’s wide slash of a mouth. Suddenly Packie the Pike laughed again, and leaned back, the bulging muscles of his neck relaxing. “You’re a fierce man, Hacker,” he said. “A fierce man.”
Hackett smiled, those bloodless lips wider and thinner than ever. “No fiercer than yourself, Packie,” he said quietly. He looked at the tinker in silence for a moment, smiling. “You wouldn’t be lying to me, now, would you? For as you know”—his smile softened, the outer corners of his eyes wrinkling—“I’m not a man to be lied to.”
They stood a moment, the detective and the tinker, regarding each other. Quirke felt again that rush of anticipation in his throat. What would he do, if Packie were to launch himself at the detective? He pictured the three of them locked together in a grunting struggle, the caravan rolling and pitching, the stove’s crooked chimney toppling and the windows shattering. He grinned to himself blearily.